The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

THE GUARDIAN Friday February 4 1994 Dead Funny something laughable at the Hampstead Theatre Rude works SIM Concerts present COLE Saturday 30th April CAMBRIDGE CORN EXCHANGE Tickets 0223 357851 Sunday 1st May NORWICH UEA Tickets 0603 505401 Tuesday 3rd May LONDON FORUM (KENTISH TOWN) Tickets 071 284 2200 071 287 0932 Thursday 5th May MANCHESTER ACADEMY Tickets 061 839 0858 061 834 5104 Friday 6th May WOLVERHAMPTON CIVIC HALL Tickets 0902 312030 with Eleanor trying to tease her husband's docile organ into life. You could say that Johnson has it both ways: what I actually think he is arguing is that there is a zesty rudeness about English comedy which may be hideously incorrect but which it is pointless to condemn. And even if, as director, he is indulgent towards his own script he pushes the frontiers of farce into areas of real pain. Zoe Wanamaker as the party-pooping Eleanor, David Haig as her apparently limp hubby, Niall Buggy as the camp follower who movingly comes out and Danny Webb and Beatie Edney as a pair of quarrelling buffs cope marvellously with the demands of Johnson's switchback style. The result: an exhilarating play that is part custardpie tragedy, part inquiring elegy for a vanishing music-hall tradition based on the principle that a dirty mind is a joy for ever.

Rude works of wife teacher, Hill's and a his passing nice psychic, old include queen a ex-showbiz who sterile pretends to be roguishly hetero, it is clear that comedy-fanciers are a pretty funny lot. Johnson has a valid point to make: that the great English comic tradition, as manifested by the innuMichael Billington English drolls while invoking their endo-ridden world of Benny Hill and hallowed memories and methods. the campy, Sarah Gamp public perJohnson's hero, Richard, is both a sona of Frankie Howerd, masks a ERRY JOHNSON wrote last consultant obstetrician and chair- sexual chauvinism and panic that year's most brilliant play in man of the Dead Funny Society (Is- rubs off on its aficionados. The fans Hysteria: a work that simul- lington branch) whose troubled think they have convened to celetaneously showed Freud as a members are poleaxed by the death brate "the joy of simple laughter" bit of a fraud and a guilt-ridden of Benny Hill. But Richard is also but, as the cynical Eleanor contragic figure.

Now, in Dead Funny at having trouble with his own mem- stantly points out, they are all vicHampstead Theatre, Johnson has ber the style is catching since tims of arrested development. written another dazzlingly equivo- his current sexual phobia is driving But Johnson's play is not a pocal piece: one that questions the du- his wife, Eleanor, to despair. And if faced lecture: its great virtue is that bious sexual values of the great one reveals that his fellow mourners it both criticises and exploits the English comic tradition. It begins with an hilarious bit of home sextherapy with Eleanor trying to tease At Hampstead Theatre (071-722-9301). DHMV I daryl daryl hall hall soul soul alone alone An album most artistes would give their vocal chords to have made Includes the singles 'Stop Loving Me, Stop Loving You' and CD Cassette LP 'I'm In A Philly Mood' KNOW HMV KNOW MUSIC Jonathan Miller ends his break from opera in London with Der Rosenkavalier for ENO Changing times Andrew Clements ER ROSENKAVALIER may not be dramatically indestructible, but it does resist aggressive intervention more effectively than most operas.

Shift it too far from the 18th century Viennese high society in which Strauss and Hofmannstahl fixed it and the delicate balance of snobbery and class self-consciousness on which the plot turns and the comedy depends will crumble away. Jonathan Miller sets his new production for ENO on the limit of the possible now it is the Vienna that Strauss would known at the very time of the composition of his most famous opera, just before the outbreak of the first world war. The whole fairy-tale world which Rosenkavalier celebrates at such length than its expressive or intellectual Classical CDs rewards; and that's certainly true of Andrew Clements MUSIC In A New Found Land, his classic study of the American tradition, Wilfrid Mellers describes Henry Cowell (1897-1965) as "an important figure in American music, as a explorer rather than as a The history of indigenous art music in the US is as old as this century, but it is still best viewed as a sequence of disjunct individual achievements. It looks coherent almost because of its incoherence; the desire to make something new links all the great composers of the American tradition. There's no common musical language or even much sharing of raw materials; the continuity of spirit defines and unifies these disparate composers, and it's a thread that in the last two decades has also linked up with rock, from the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa to Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson.

Often the implications of the music rather than the music itself has mattered most. Even Ives is arguably more important for what his music makes possible than for what it is, for its ear-opening inclusivity rather much of Cowell's output, which in so many ways epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the experimental tradition. A friend of Percy Grainger and the first biographer of Ives. Cowell was a self-taught composer and his music is a blithe mixture of innumerable ingredients almost carelessly juxtaposed. On the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra's collection it is the folksy, naive side of his world that emerges more strongly than the grittier experiments.

The piano pieces brought together in Chris Burn's enterprising collection offer the real surprises: the use of pentatonic and whole-tones scales to produce Debussy-like washes of colour in The Snows Of Fujiyama, muted and plucked piano strings 30 years before John Cage's prepared piano in Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance. The results are hit and miss, but sometimes quite exhilarating. Allan Feinberg includes Acolian Harp and two other Cowell pieces in his lightning 17-track tour through 80 years of Americana. There's scarcely a corner of the tradition left unilluminated, and the stylistic range is wide. Everything is played with great panache but none of the works here is very substantial: even Milton.